Robert S. Strauss, Presidential Confidant and Deal Maker, Dies at 95

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Robert S. Strauss with his boss, President Jimmy Carter, after a signing ceremony for the Trade Act of 1979, which Mr. Strauss pushed as the special representative for trade negotiations.CreditCreditDennis Cook/Associated Press

Robert S. Strauss, who rose from the Texas Plains to become an influential Washington insider, leading the Democratic Party and hopscotching among White House posts when not making millions as a lobbyist and deal maker, died on Wednesday in Washington. He was 95.

His law firm, Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, confirmed his death.

Mr. Strauss was known for a quick wit and a rough-hewn persuasiveness that recalled his small-town roots and enhanced his prowess among a vanishing breed of back-room power brokers. His knowledge, contacts and instincts — reaching across parties and administrations — ran so deep that he was almost invariably included in the tiny, powerful fraternity known as Washington’s “wise men.”

He called himself a “centrist, a worker, a doer, a putter-together.”

As chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Strauss helped mastermind his party’s recapture of the White House in 1976 with the election of Jimmy Carter after Senator George McGovern’s resounding defeat in 1972. He went on to become a trusted adviser to Mr. Carter, serving as special trade representative, a negotiator in Middle East peace talks and chief adviser to Mr. Carter’s anti-inflation campaign.

It was Mr. Strauss whom Nancy Reagan asked to tell her husband, President Ronald Reagan, that the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages scandal was corroding his administration and that he had to make changes. It was Mr. Strauss whom President George Bush in 1991 appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union, even after he told the president that he had never voted for him for anything. Mr. Strauss became ambassador to the newly non-Communist Russian Federation.

Bob Woodward wrote in his book “Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate” (1999) that when some Republican leaders in the House of Representatives were having second thoughts about impeaching President Bill Clinton, they turned to Mr. Strauss to ask other Republican leaders to consider censure instead.

Through the law firm he co-founded — Akin, Gump — Mr. Strauss deftly navigated the territory where business and government intersect and deals are made. Over Thanksgiving dinner in 1990 at the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, he brokered final details of Matsushita Electric’s takeover of MCA for $6.6 billion. His reported $8 million fee was split between both sides, because he had represented both.

Afterward, he told a Washington Post reporter that, as usual, he had not counted hours to arrive at his fee. “I don’t do windows,” he said.

Mr. Strauss’s effectiveness owed much to his vivid personality. In 1978, as special trade representative, he startled Nobuhiko Ushiba, his Japanese counterpart, by embracing him and shouting: “Brother Ushiba, you’re crazy as hell!” The laughter lowered tensions.

When Mr. Carter ordered White House personnel to fly coach, reporters asked Mr. Strauss if he would still fly first-class. “Yes,” he said, “unless there is something better.”

Others joked about Mr. Strauss’s cultivation of the role of “insider’s insider.” Jim Wright, the former House speaker and a fellow Texan, said of him, “It’s an honor to have with us a close friend of the next president of the United States — whoever the hell he may be.”

Some sneered at such dexterity. Michael Kinsley, writing in The New Republic in 1988, questioned whether Mr. Strauss had any ideology whatsoever or had ever had a principled disagreement with anyone. He called Mr. Strauss “99 percent hot air.”

But few disagreed that Mr. Strauss operated as a sort of human political switchboard. (He sent candy to the real switchboard operators at the White House and Christmas cards to 4,000 close friends.)

“People call Bob back,” Harry McPherson, a White House aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, said in an interview with The New York Times in 1987. “He’s inside the circuit, he’s a conveyor of information. He’s got a lot of ideas, not all of them good, but he’s part of the flow. That’s why you want him at your meeting.”

Robert Schwarz Strauss was born on Oct. 19, 1918, in Lockhart, Tex. His father, Charles, immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1915 hoping to become a concert pianist, but the closest he came was selling pianos on the road. He met Edith V. Schwarz on a sales trip. They married and remained in Texas, moving first to Hamlin and then to nearby Stamford, where they had a general store.

Mr. Strauss’s mother had lofty ambitions for him, predicting he would be the first Jewish governor of Texas. He said he did not remember anti-Semitism growing up in a town with almost no Jews.

While attending the University of Texas, Mr. Strauss worked for the successful campaign of Travis B. Dean for the State Legislature and was rewarded with a patronage job as a committee clerk. He went on to help Lyndon B. Johnson in a congressional campaign and John B. Connally, a future governor of Texas, in his campaign for student body president.

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Mr. Strauss, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee, presiding during a meeting of the committee in 1973.CreditAssociated Press

After graduating from the University of Texas School of Law in 1941, Mr. Strauss was recruited by the F.B.I. to be an agent. “It was a way of not getting drafted,” he told The New Yorker in 1979.

With his friend Richard Gump he formed the Akin, Gump law firm in Dallas in 1945, specializing in energy law. (They opened a Washington office in 1971. “Washington looked like a sitting duck,” he told The Washington Post Magazine in 1982.)

His political stock rose in 1962, when he helped elect Mr. Connally governor of Texas; the new governor named him to the state bank board. He attracted larger notice in 1968 by managing Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey’s presidential campaign in Texas. Mr. Strauss persuaded Mr. Connally and his archrival, the more liberal Senator Ralph Yarborough, to set aside their feud and join forces to help Mr. Humphrey. The vice president carried Texas by one percentage point, though he lost the election narrowly to Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. Connally named Mr. Strauss that year to Texas’ slot on the Democratic National Committee. Within a year Mr. Strauss was a member of its executive committee. Elected party treasurer in 1970, he cut the Democrats’ $9 million debt by two-thirds and found new ways to raise money, like direct mail.

After serving as chairman of the National Committee to Re-elect a Democratic Congress in 1972, he was elected Democratic national chairman that December, after Mr. McGovern’s defeat. He strove to unite the party’s bitterly divided factions.

A seemingly minor decision had large import: Mr. Strauss named Mr. Carter, then governor of Georgia, to be chairman of the Democrats’ 1974 Congressional campaign effort. Mr. Carter used the job to travel the nation and lay the groundwork for his own 1976 presidential campaign.

Mr. Strauss then smoothed Mr. Carter’s path to the White House by running the Democrats’ 1976 convention at Madison Square Garden in New York as a well-received television extravaganza — a sharp contrast with the ideological blood battles of the 1968 and ’72 conventions. Such disparate figures as Coretta Scott King and former Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama addressed the delegates.

After Mr. Carter’s election Mr. Strauss resigned as the unpaid party chairman to practice law, but he joined the administration in March 1977 as special representative for trade negotiations with the rank of ambassador. He pushed to complete the Tokyo round of trade talks, culminating in the Trade Act of 1979. Soon he was appointed Mr. Carter’s chief anti-inflation adviser.

“His program was to pick up the phone and swear — and he was very good at it,” Alfred E. Kahn, chairman of the Council on Wage and Price Stability at the time, told The New Yorker.

In April 1979 Mr. Strauss became Mr. Carter’s personal representative to the Middle East peace talks, which then concerned Palestinian autonomy in the Israeli-occupied territories. Years later, speaking to The Los Angeles Times, an unidentified friend quoted Mr. Strauss’s response to getting the assignment.

“The first thing I’m going to do is go to Israel and court Premier Begin’s wife like she was an 18-year-old schoolgirl,” Mr. Strauss said, according to the friend, referring to Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

“Then I’ll go to Egypt and court Sadat’s wife the same way,” he continued, referring to President Anwar el-Sadat. Before long, Mr. Strauss predicted, “one of those ladies is going to turn around in bed to her husband and say: ‘You know, that little Bobby Strauss is not such a bad guy. Why don’t you do something nice for him?’ ”

Five months later he resigned to become chairman of Mr. Carter’s 1980 re-election campaign. After Mr. Carter lost to Reagan, Mr. Strauss slipped into the role of unofficial adviser to the new president and a lunchtime companion of Mrs. Reagan’s.

“Bob Strauss is a very loyal friend,” Mr. Carter remarked. “He waited a whole week after the election before he had dinner with Ronald Reagan.”

Mr. Strauss’s wife of 65 years, the former Helen Jacobs, died in 2006. He is survived by his sons, Robert and Richard; his daughter, Susan Strauss Breen; his brother, Theodore; and seven grandchildren.

If Mr. Strauss sometimes seemed glib, he insisted it served a purpose. Speaking to The New Yorker, he readily conceded that his influence came from knowing the right people.

“I have a pretty good encyclopedia of America, but I couldn’t recite it,” he said. “If you mention a town to me, I know who the mayor or the sheriff or the commissioner is, and whether he is reliable or unreliable.”

Correction:March 21, 2014

An obituary on Thursday about the former Democratic Party chairman and White House official Robert S. Strauss misidentified the president who awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It was Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan.

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